Thomas Reid

1898. This little book is an attempt to present Reid in a fresh light, and in his relations to present-day thought. It deals with the Scottish chapter in that enduring alternation between agnostic despair and endeavor after perfect insight which seems to be a law of the philosophic progress of mankind. Thomas Reid, homebred and self-contained, is the national representative, in the eighteenth century, of the via media between these extremes. In the concluding chapter I have looked at the philosophical appeal to inspired data of Common Sense, in the wider light of the theistic philosophy of the universe, and not merely as part of an inductive science of the human mind. This connects the theistic postulate of spiritual reason, as the foundation of human experience, with Reid's appeal to the ultimate but often dormant necessities of human nature. Contents: Boyhood and Ancestry: Strachan and the Valley of the Dee; At Marischal College; New Machar and David Hume; Old Aberdeen: A Regent in King's College; Universal Skepticism versus Inspired Common Sense: An Inquiry into the Human Mind on the Principles of Common Sense; Glasgow College: The Professor of Moral Philosophy; In Philosophical Retirement: Authorship in Old Age; Inspired Common Sense and Causation: Active or Moral Power in Man; The End; Retrospective and Critical; and Reid in the Nineteenth Century: Development of the Common Sense Philosophy: Reid in France: Reid and Hamilton; Reid and Scoto-Hegelian Idealism; Ethical or Theistic Final Faith.